Race to the rock

There are so many ways race to the rock is inspiring and good. For an introduction read about the first 2016 ride. Race to the rock happened again in 2017 and 2018. An active online community emerged quickly that serves up a constant stream of visual inspiration.

This post is a little different, but hopefully adds another tasty tidbit to the race-to-the-rock soup.

Each rider carries a live gps tracker that, in combination with map progress website, provides easily accessible data about their ride. (The full data set is available here). Some quick summary stats:

The data set for the four finishers provided 10522 datapoints
In 8.3% of those datapoints were stopped (or less than 0.5 km/hr)

This post is about playing around with that data.

Distance

Speeds

Figure 1 shows the distribution of speed in km/hr between each pair of data points.

Figure 1: Distribution of speed

Mapping the speed by each data point results in Figure ??. The map is set to zoom on about Leigh Creek, but you can pan/zoom anywhere.

The following table shows the first few records for each rider. If the table options are hard to see, press the lightbulb at the top-right of the page to switch to ‘light’ mode.